CRISPR diagnostics is coming

Nature was right in choosing CRISPR diagnostic as one of the seven technologies to watch in 2022. The latest news is a test called mCARMEN, described in Nature Medicine. Pardis Sabeti (Broad Institute/Harvard), Cameron Myhrvold (Princeton University) and colleagues adapted a massively multiplexed technology presented in 2020 to be “faster, more sensitive and more easily implemented in clinical and surveillance labs”.

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CRISPR rising stars

Andrew Anzalone (Broad Institute), Jennifer Hamilton (Berkeley) and Cameron Myhrvold (Princeton)

December is time for rankings and forecasts. Let’s start with STAT News celebrating young talents who could become the next generation of scientific superstars. Three CRISPR researchers appear among STAT wunderkinds. As a postdoc at the Broad Institute, Andrew Anzalone helped make a key advance by developing prime editing, where the same RNA molecule specifies the target and the desired edit. Jennifer Hamilton, from Berkeley, works on solving one of the major hurdles of CRISPR-based therapies: delivering the genome editor to the desired cells. Cameron Myhrvold, has since worked at the Broad Institute on developing CRISPR-based diagnostics such as CARMEN and is about to start his own lab at Princeton.

When CARMEN met the coronavirus

Say hello to CARMEN: a massively multiplexed, Cas13-based technology for nucleic acid detection, out yesterday in Nature. Its name stands for Combinatorial Arrayed Reactions for Multiplexed Evaluation of Nucleic acids, and it allows us to test many amplified samples for the presence of many viral sequences by using miniaturized detection reactions that self-organize in a microwell array. Sars-Cov2 included.

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